Roll of the Dice: Long Time Comin’

“We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence.”  –Bruce Springsteen, Springsteen on Broadway

Bruce Springsteen said those words while recalling “the greatest moment in my life with my dad”–the moment his father offered his version of an apology to the son he hadn’t shown up for when he had the chance.

“My father on that day was petitioning me for an ancestral role in my life after being a ghost for a long, long time,” he continued.

The year was 1990, and the day was one of the final ones of Bruce’s pre-fatherhood life. Douglas Springsteen knew how transformative the days ahead would be and wanted to release his son from the ghosts that haunted his songwriting since “Adam Raised a Cain.”

“He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship,” Bruce explained, “and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning I was about to experience.”

Bruce accepted his father’s apology and embraced fatherhood, determined to shed his father’s ghost and show up for his children in a way his father hadn’t for him. By his own account he succeeded, with some coaching and nudging from his wife along the way.

His second child was born a year-and-a-half after his first, and in 1993 a third was on the way. Before Sam made his debut, the Springsteen family took to the desert for a camping trip, and that trip inspired the song that would close the book on the father-and-son theme that had carried through Bruce’s songwriting for fifteen years.

It was the song that Bruce was introducing when he spoke those lines on Broadway, a song so significant to its author and his life’s work that it has received no less than three official studio releases to date.

But neither the official studio track nor any full-band performance can match the power of Bruce’s intimate acoustic performances, so let’s honor the theme of Bruce’s song by breaking with this blog’s tradition and listening instead to the Broadway version of “Long Time Comin'” as our primary source.

“Long Time Comin'” is the song-length epiphany of a father who realizes belatedly–but not too-latedly–that the greatest gifts he can bestow upon his children are his presence in their lives and the freedom to reject the traits he had no choice but to accept from his own father.

As a young man on the cusp of 30, Bruce railed and raged against his father’s inheritance in “Adam Raised a Cain.” At 32, he tried to bridge their gulf in “My Father’s House.” By the age of 37, he’d begun to filter his father’s influence in “Walk Like a Man,” and by the time he debuted “Long Time Comin'” on his solo acoustic tour just a few days after his 47th birthday, he’d found redemption–his own, and his father’s.

He hasn’t released an original song about fathers and sons since.

Bruce performed “Long Time Comin'” throughout the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, but he didn’t actually go into the studio to record it until after the tour was over. The official version of the song was recorded sometime in 1997 or 1998, and it wasn’t released until Devils & Dust in 2005.

In between, a new rhythm section was added, with Steve Jordan and Brendan O’Brien joining Bruce, Danny, Patti, Soozie, and Marty Rifkin on the steel guitar from the original session.

That hybrid official track captures the narrator’s jubilation over his unexpected freedom, but it loses the pensiveness that tempers and adds emotional heft to Bruce’s acoustic versions. Even the little-seen acoustic version of the song included on the DualDisc DVD version of Devils & Dust outshines the band version on the opposite side of the disc.

In the acoustic version, we can see the narrator’s night sky. We can hear the crackling campfire. And we can feel the presence of our partner and our children, the souls that matter most in our trip through this life.

It’s on this night, in this setting, where we join our narrator at the moment of his awakening.

Out where the creek turns shallow and sandy
And the moon comes skimming away the stars
The wind in the mesquite comes rushing over the hilltops
Straight into my arms
Straight into my arms

I’m riding hard carrying a cache of roses
And a fresh map that I made
Tonight I’m gonna get birth naked and bury my old soul
And dance on its grave
And dance on its grave

It’s been a long time coming, my dear
It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s here
And now it’s here

Even for a songwriter as fond of metaphor as Bruce, there is a lot of symbolism in the first third of “Long Time Comin’.”

From the shallowed creek that lays bare the riverbed of his soul, to the bright light of the moon that represents the outsized importance of these three lives against millions of others, to the divine wind that bestows the grace and wisdom of his epiphany, Bruce’s lyrics are gorgeously (and frankly, uncharacteristically) understated and delicate.

Our narrator rides hard through this life, but he now carries love where he once carried resentment. He bears a fresh map, signifying not just a new beginning but a new course. And he sheds his pain, resentment, and anger in the skin of his old soul and celebrates his hard-won, long-awaited freedom.

His freedom from his ghosts is what’s been long in coming, and the arrival of his ancestors. In the middle section of the song, we learn why.

Well my daddy he was just a stranger
Lived in a hotel downtown
Well when I was a kid he was just somebody
Somebody I’d see around
Somebody I’d see around

Well now down below and pulling on my shirt
Yeah I got some kids of my own
Well if I had one wish in this god forsaken world, kids
It’d be that your mistakes would be your own
Yeah your sins would be your own

It’s been a long time coming, my dear
It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s here
And now it’s here

Our narrator never knew his father. He only knew of him. In this narrator’s case, it may be literal. For the songwriter, it may be metaphorical. Douglas Springsteen didn’t live in a hotel downtown, but Bruce may have felt like he never really understood him.

We never seem to see these lines listed among Bruce’s most powerful lyrics, but I’d rank “he was just somebody, somebody I’d see around” very close to the top. It’s hard for me to listen to the second, trailing “somebody I’d see around” without my throat catching.

But it’s the next lines that hold the key to the song:

“If I had one wish in this godforsaken world, kids, it’d be that your mistakes would be your own.”

Bruce has spoken to this wish directly and often, both from the stage and in print. In his 2016 autobiography, he wrote:

We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. I decided between my father and me that the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together. In analysis you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it’s the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry. Insisting on our own experience, our own final calculus of love, trouble, hard times and, if we’re lucky, a little transcendence. This is how we claim our own lives as sons and daughters, independent souls on our piece of ground.

He’d said it more powerfully and in far fewer words two decades earlier.

But it’s the dawning of that wish–the desire that your kids not take after you but instead honor you by deciding for themselves which parts of you to adopt as their own–that frees our narrator from the shackles that chain him to his own father.

As we segue into the final third of the song, celebration gives way to reflection and determination.

Out ‘neath the arms of Cassiopeia
Where the sword of Orion sweeps
It’s me and you, Rosie, crackling like crossed wires
And you breathing in your sleep
You breathing in your sleep

Well there’s just a spark of a campfire left burning
Two kids in a sleeping bag beside
I reach ‘neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly
And feel another one kicking inside
And I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time

It’s been a long time coming, my dear
It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s here

Of the first half of the verse, not much need be said other than: no, I don’t think Rosie is a hat tip to Rosalita (although it may be a wink at Neil Diamond) and thank god someone finally told Bruce how Orion is pronounced sometime between 2006 and 2012, because that mispronunciation is a mild but distracting annoyance in every version of the song pre-Wrecking Ball Tour. (You can see Bruce remind himself to sing it correctly in the second clip below.)

Let’s linger on that second half of the verse, though, because these lines also contend for a place among Bruce’s best:

Well there’s just a spark of a campfire left burning
Two kids in a sleeping bag beside
I reach ‘neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly
And feel another one kicking inside
And I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time

It’s here that we learn what’s prompted our protagonist’s epiphany: the imminent arrival of his third child. (It also lends another layer of meaning to the chorus.) This isn’t just an opportunity to course-correct with his current children, it’s a chance for him to get it right from the start with his next one.

There’s something else powerful about this verse, though.

Between the first and third verses, our narrator’s imagery is flowery and at times borders on treacle. That’s not a criticism of Bruce’s lyrics, because it’s a reflection of his character’s state of mind. But Bruce knows that to stick the landing, he needs to bring his narrator back from the sky to the earth, and he does so with a coarse final line that succeeds in convincing us of the permanence of his transformation precisely because of its grounded earthiness.

It’s a brilliant ending, one that resonates with audiences and generates a reaction almost every time Bruce sings it.

“Long Time Comin'” ends on a note of hope and optimism, love and acceptance. It’s almost irresistibly tempting to imagine a common narrator threading from “Adam Raised a Cain” to “Independence Day” to “Walk Like a Man” through to “Long Time Comin.”

Of course there is a common narrator–the songwriter himself, who gifts us with intimate insight into his troubled but ultimately redemptive relationship with his father and shows us that it’s possible to accept the best of our parents and filter out the worst, if we’re willing to do the work. It’s a timely and valuable lesson on this day.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, current and future.

May we not fuck it up this time.

Long Time Comin’
Recorded: 1997-2004
Released: Devils & Dust (2005), The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2015), Chapter and Verse (2016)
First performed: October 16, 1996 (Denver, CO)
Last performed: December 5, 2018 (New York City, NY)

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